The present application relates to increasing the dynamic range of images.
Many scenes existing in the real world inherently have extremely high dynamic range. For example, white paper in full sunlight has a luminance level of 30,000 cd/m^2, while white paper in the full moon has a luminance level of 0.01 cd/m^2, giving a dynamic range of 3 million to one (or 6.4 log units). The human eye can see even dimmer levels than 0.01 cd/m^2, so the visible range is even greater. In most situations, the dynamic range of a single scene is usually not this great, but it is frequently in excess of 5 log units. The human eye can only see 2-3 log units at a given instant, but is able to adjust the range via light adaptation, which can be less than a few seconds for the smaller adjustments, such as being able to go from reading a magazine in the sun to looking into the shadow under a car. More extreme range changes, such as going into a movie theatre from daylight, can take more than a minute.
Since traditional displays (both soft copy and hard copy) are not capable of displaying the full range luminances of the real world, a luminance mapping transfer is used to map from the dynamic range of the real world to the lower dynamic range of the display. Generally this mapping is performed in the image capture stage, and examples include the shoulder of D-Log-E curve for film, saturation for CCD sensors, or clipping in the A/D stages of such capture processes. These mapping functions are generally point processes, that is, ID functions of luminance that are applied per pixel (in the digital versions).
Computer graphics can generate images in floating point that match the luminances of the real world (generally, radiance approaches). In addition, some digital cameras similarly capture images with 12 to 16 bits per color. These are usually represented in a 16-bit format (examples: Radiance XYZ, OpenEXR, scRGB). But these digital images cannot be traditionally displayed without conversion to the lower dynamic range of the display. Generally the mapping algorithms for conversion from a greater to a lower dynamic range for the display capabilities are referred to as Tone Mapping Operators (TMO).
Tone Mapping Operators can be point processes, as mentioned for film and digital capture, but they can include spatial processes as well. Regardless of the type of TMO, all the approaches have traditionally been designed to go from a high dynamic range (HDR) image to a lower dynamic range (LDR) display (this term encompasses standard dynamic range, SDR).